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The first time it happens it's a joke, more or less.
"Oh, some good news for a change," Jesper says, so cheerful that Wylan assumes he's being sarcastic.
"Cotton yields are down again?" he guesses. Jesper could be talking about almost anything; going through reports and mail and news in the morning is like trying to weave without a loom, holding all of the threads in your hands at the same time. They tried to work in a neat rational order when they first moved into the house on Geldstraat, sifting through stacks of paper in the parlor because the office was still a wreck, but that had been a hopeless task. As soon as they'd have sorted everything out, another half-dozen messenger would come bringing stock trends or shipping manifests or word of a typhoon along some vital trade route, and they'd be thrown back into chaos. They gave up trying to fight the chaos. At least jumping between topics every few minutes kept things interesting.
"Actual good news. Inej is back in town." Jesper flashes a grin, and Wylan reflects it back to him. He'd missed Inej. "She's inviting everyone who's never sunk a slaver ship to buy her a drink at the Crow Club."
Wylan's mood dims again. "Is that really a good idea?"
"Well, that would be a lot of alcohol, but I don't think she'll make anyone pay up. She's just bragging."
"I meant for me," Wylan says. "I can't set foot in the Barrel. You should go on your own."
It's an obvious, reasonable statement, one that requires no explanation; Jesper ought to just nod and move on to the next item on their non-existent agenda. Instead he cocks his head in that way that Wylan has learned means he is about to be both smart and frustrating.
"Why?"
"Because." The trouble with obvious reasonable statements that require no explanation is that he doesn't know how to explain them. "I'm...respectable, now," although he doesn't feel respectable. A respectable merchant wouldn't let his assistant sit on his desk with the sole of one shoe on top of a stack of correspondence. A respectable merchant wouldn't have woken up next to his assistant that morning.
"We won't hold it against you," Jesper says, although the drawl in his voice means he's planning on taking some advantage of Wylan.
"I mean it. Geldstraat merchants don't just visit the Barrel whenever they feel like it." Particularly not merchants who are the focus of public interest. Wylan had hoped the curiosity would have died down by now, but between the scandal of his father, the mystery of his not-dead mother, the size of the Van Eck fortune, and his lack of experience, there were plenty of business men and society ladies watching to see whether he'd run the business into the ground before he even had an heir to disappoint by squandering their inheritance.
"You're overestimating our neighbors," Jesper says. Wylan starts to object -- the Merch Council is the worst versus we still have to get along with them is by now an old argument -- but Jesper doesn't let him. "Fine. If a man of industry can't visit a friend in the Barrel, then go as a demo expert."
"I thought I was passable at demo," he says, because Jesper isn't the only one who can be difficult or hold a petty grudge.
"If you really want me to shower you with compliments, I will," Jesper warns him. "But that'll take the rest of the morning. Wylan Van Eck won't get all his work done before Wylan Hendriks needs to sneak out of the house."
"That wasn't even a good alias," he grumbles. "It didn't fool anyone."
"It fooled me. Are you saying I don't count?"
"Yes, I am." Wylan waits for Jesper to make a face. "You're not just anyone."
Jesper's expression softens, exaggerated offense slipping away into something warm and wondering. Wylan can't out-flirt him, and anytime he tries it's a disaster, but sometimes he manages to say something right.
"Does that mean you're going to listen to me?" Jesper doesn't quite make sound like a joke.
Wylan considers. There is a risk, whatever Jesper says. They could run afoul of a gang or one of Jesper's old creditors. They could get picked up by the stadwatch. They could be seen by someone who knows him, the real him, who could spread rumors about the young Mister Van Eck and his questionable decisions and the company he keeps.
On the other hand, he misses Inej. And he misses Jesper, as strange as that is when they live in the same house. But Jesper had left, to visit his father in Novyi Zem, to search for Grisha in Ravka. His absence still washes over Wylan sometimes, like feeling the rock of a boat under his feet after returning to dry land. Wylan looks at Jesper and wants, even though he already has him, even though Jesper has been back for a month and shows no sign of leaving again. Even though Jesper had put off his trip so much longer than Wylan had expected, long enough for Marya to move back home, long enough for Wylan to get a grasp on the business, long enough for Jesper to vet assistants to take his place while he was gone -- two of them, "because I only trust them so far," he'd reasoned, "they can keep each other honest," and both of them ancient, "because you only trust me so far?" Wylan had asked dryly. Jesper had refused to be shamed: "I just want to make sure you're glad to see me when I come back."
How could he not be glad, every time he sees Jesper?
Wylan says "yes" to Jesper again. His doubts aren't dispelled, but he makes the decision anyway, and he's surprised to find that quiets them. It's only the Barrel. How bad could it be?
They do get caught in a brawl outside of the Crow Club, late that night or early the next morning, but it's only a little one. Jesper is smug the entire next day.
-
The second time it happens it's serious, and more than a little desperate.
"I don't like these numbers."
"You're going to hurt their feelings." Jesper lets a handful of bullets rain down on his desk. He was supposedly fabrikating the metal in them, but Wylan suspected he'd stopped practicing some time ago and just been fiddling meaninglessly. It could be hard to tell, when Jesper could use an interruption. "I thought you loved all numbers."
"Not when they're hiding something."
Jesper wanders over until he can read over the ledger over Wylan's shoulder. The information on every page is filled out in exactly the same format, so he can still follow the numbers without being able to read the words next to them. "Is that the shipping fleet based out of Eames Harbor?"
"Yes."
"Since when is their delivery rate that good?"
"Never, as far as I can remember."
Jesper pulls another ledger off the shelf. It only takes him a second to find it, although his filing system defeats everyone else who's every tried to access it. "Never is generous," he says as he flips through the pages. "I'm surprised your dad stayed in business with them. Why did he stay in business with them? Why do we?"
"It's hard to find ships that will go that far inland." Wylan thinks he's said this to Jesper before. He thinks he's heard Jesper say it. Sometimes it feels like they've been running this business their entire lives. "Slow moving cargo is better than no cargo at all."
"And fast moving cargo is better than slow."
"Depends where the change came from."
"Maybe they've decided to buckle down, put their noses to the grindstone, and rededicate themselves to their work in tribute to Ghezen."
Wylan snorts. "Yeah, no."
"Aw." Jesper winks at him. "You're cute when you're pessimistic."
"I'd love to be an optimist, I just know better." He knows how his father would handle this. His father used to tell him about all the things he'd have to do when he grew up, which had turned into all the things he'd never be able to do -- he would say that it was Wylan's responsibility to know every aspect of what transpired in his empire, and that made it his right to drop in on any part of the business, at any time. Wylan had gone on trips like that with his father, when he was little, followed along as he inspected farms and mines and oil fields. He remembers the joy of being somewhere new, outdoors, away from schoolwork. He remembers when he started to recognize the looks on men's faces, their desperate anxious need to satisfy Jan Van Eck. He sighs. "We have to check on this, don't we?"
"You don't have to do anything, ever." It's an outrageous statement -- the business requires so much from them that Wylan is surprised sometimes that they're both still here -- but Jesper is not above taking an opposing position to Wylan's just for the sake of argument.
"I do. Trust but verify, right?"
Jesper doesn't react, like he's waiting for something else, or like he isn't convinced.
"All right," he says finally. "I'll make travel arrangements."
It's a week before they're able to sail into the harbor. Wylan doesn't send a message ahead that he's coming, but by the time they step onto the dock -- Wylan more than eager to leave the boat behind, Jesper as irritatingly lively as ever -- there's already a messenger there to greet them and bring them to the captain of the fleet.
Wylan cuts off the captain when he tries to invite them to lunch, requests a tour of the fleet in a cool voice that makes it clear this isn't a request. The captain happily shows them around, lets them talk to the workers and flip through the books. Everything looks fine. Wylan mentions the increased productivity, but the fleet caption doesn't even bat an eye before giving him a lengthy explanation about favorable currents and rising sea temperatures.
He comes away with a distinct impression that he's only seeing what he's supposed to see.
"Now what?" he asks, sprawled out on a bed in an inn a few miles up the coast. It isn't a very nice bed -- it isn't a very nice inn -- but he'd wanted to walk for a while, and by the time it occurred to them that they'd need to find somewhere to stay, the options were limited.
Jesper shrugs and fiddles with the cord hanging from the curtains. He'd slipped away at one point to have his own look around the fleet. He hadn't turned up anything either, and he excelled at finding the illicit and unsavory. "We could lie back and enjoy the fact that our profits are going up."
"You don't meant that."
"Why not? I didn't make any vows to Ghezen to be industrious."
"No, but you wouldn't be much of a Barrel boy if someone gave you free money and you didn't look for the strings attached to it."
"Oh, is Wylan Hendriks going to teach me how to be a Barrel boy?"
His breath catches.
"Actually," he starts.
It takes them a while to scrounge up suitable disguises. Jesper complains repeatedly about Wylan's appearance, even though he was the one who dressed him.
"No one is going to buy that you're a sailor," he fusses, tugging down Wylan's cap for the seventh or eighth time because Saints, we need to hide those curls. "A cabin boy, maybe."
"Oh, like anyone would hire a lanky thing like you."
Jesper grins at that, the way he does whenever Wylan throws his mockery back at him. Jesper loves teasing and Wylan regardless of how they're combined.
It's a long walk back to the docks, and more time wandering until they find a tavern that looks to be where sailors and dockworkers congregate. Wylan buys them drinks and then mostly tries to fade into the background while Jesper works.
The hardest part is to keep himself from staring. Ghezen, he loves watching Jesper shine, and he's in his element from the moment they step inside. It isn't so different from flirting, maybe, but Wylan finds this even more baffling, how Jesper can treat a room of strangers like friends and have them all respond in kind. By the time they've finished their first drinks he's gathered gossip about a few dozen people they'll never meet, helped an old deckhand light his pipe, and bummed some jurda off of a welder that he's going to regret when he's still awake at four in the morning. He even arm wrestles against an enormous fisherman; he loses, badly, but the fisherman laughs and buys the next round. The other tavern patrons seem strangely proud of him for trying, with those little twig arms! Wylan feels vindicated.
He's vindicated again when it's late and the tavern has grown subdued. Jesper steers the conversation with so light a touch that Wylan barely notices him do it, even though he's watching for it. It doesn't take much to draw out the rumor that Van Eck's local fleet picked up a Tidemaker a few months back -- no one has seen him but the sailors talk -- he's not allowed off at port -- they keep him in chains -- must be an indenture -- might be he skipped out on his indenture --
Favorable currents, the captain had said. They would be, with a Tidemaker at his command. Wylan doesn't feel vindicated. He feels gloomy and tired; his mood doesn't improve in the morning, returning to the fleet with half of a hangover and Jesper wearing his pistols prominently, seeing the captain's face turn to panic when he realizes he's been found out. Wylan remembers that expression, too.
-
He doesn't really decide that it's going to happen again after that, it just -- happens.
"I know I said the opera was boring," Jesper says, somehow not out of breath. "But if I knew that sneaking out during the second act would end with us getting chased halfway across town -- "
"You would have snuck out during the first act?" Wylan pants.
Jesper likes to mock Kerch's upper class for pretending that leisurely games of golf and vacations to sunny beaches are business affairs, but Wylan wishes it were a joke. Business really does happen anywhere merch congregate, which means that he can't skip these events, even though he always gets it slightly wrong: Complimenting the artwork a host had on display and then having to sit through a self-satisfied lecture on how much it had cost. Making conversation with someone standing alone at a gala only to find out later that he'd unintentionally taken sides in a feud he didn't know existed. Actually listening to the opera instead of gossiping during intermission about what the other members of the audience are wearing and who they've brought to their theater boxes.
So when he could tell that Jesper was getting antsy he figured they wouldn't miss much if they just left.
He hadn't considered what they'd be leaving the opera for. He hadn't expected for someone to try to pick his pocket, for Jesper to make fun of the pickpocket, for the pickpocket to have a lot of angry friends.
Probably the fact that the night had started with Jesper asking for directions to the worst bar in town should have been a hint.
"Wish I had my demo kit," Wylan says, and is struck by how much he means it.
"Destroying property?" Jesper asks, scandalized, as he breaks a nearby window.
"I'd settle for a flash bomb."
Jesper unlatches the window and opens it, brushes shards of glass off the sill and gestures: after you. Wylan hops in through the window and peeks into the next room. No sign of anyone coming to investigate. He signals for Jesper to follow.
A moment later they hear the sounds of pursuit from the street. Wylan holds his breath. They'd thrown the curtain shut but the broken window could still give them away. Jesper is taut with anticipation, his hand resting on the one concealed pistol that's all he carries on business. Wylan is hyper aware of every inch of him, the brightness of his eyes, the air leaving his lungs. He steps forward and presses his lips to Jesper's.
Jesper kisses him back, light and easy. One hand comes up to rest on his back. The other hand stays on the gun.
Wylan steps back. The street outside is silent.
"If that was a kiss for good luck, I'd say it worked," Jesper says.
"It was a final request."
"Aw, you don't have faith in me?"
"Get us back to the hotel and we'll see."
"Hm." Jesper's hand rubs a slow circle against his back. "We should find somewhere to lay low for a while before we head back. That's going to be hard to do when you look rich."
Wylan takes off his coat and lets it fall to the ground. The tailored black wool had been expensive; he should feel worse than he does about leaving it behind. His shirt is good quality, too, but he doesn't think taking that off would help them avoid attention. "Give me your vest."
"Why?" but he's already undoing the buttons.
"Because no one could look at it and think the person wearing that must have a lot of money."
"You've just burned the good will that you got for stripping," Jesper informs him.
They exit out the other side of the building without running into anyone. Wylan has absolutely no idea where they are. This neighborhood hadn't been included in the welcome to our city, wealthy potential investor tour they'd gotten when they arrived.
"Well, none of this looks familiar." Jesper slings an arm around his shoulders. "C'mon, let's go get lost."
-
It's easier, as it turns out. When he'd traveled with his father, everything had been the finest available: the ships, the lodgings, the horses, the guides. Sometimes, traveling somewhere remote, the finest available wasn't much more than what anyone else had. And sometimes the finest available was the Ice Court. But in either case the distinction had to be made, because if they don't respect you then you've lost the negotiation before it began.
But traveling in style creates its own problems. He gets luxurious suites in hotels and the largest berth of any ship, and then has to stay in them alone. Everyone from indentures to politicians pay attention when he speaks, closer than he usually wants them to. People expect him to be accompanied by associates and servants, and so he either has to bring people he'd rather leave at home to mind the business and his mother, or just bring Jesper and pretend he can't hear the pointed questions about whether recent affairs have been taxing on his household.
So he starts traveling cheap. Not all the time, because there are appearances to maintain, but sometimes they book anonymous passage on a crowded freighter and don't announce themselves until they've arrived at their destination, or not even then. Wylan doesn't have his father's presence or experience or history with the people he's working with; he needs to find ways to make up for that. Getting to see what trade partners and suppliers are up to when they don't know they're being watched is one way of doing it. Occasionally he's pleasantly surprised.
Mostly he isn't.
"Mind if we join you?" Jesper asks the group of workers crowded around the only tree in sight.
No one says yes, but no one says no either, and Jesper takes that as an opportunity. He takes a seat on the edge of the shade and Wylan drops down next to him with entirely real weariness. They walked ten miles this morning, half of them going out of their way so they could end up here.
Wylan pulls a water bottle out of his pack and takes a drink. He offers it to Jesper, who offers it to the worker next to him. The man takes it and drinks without saying thank you.
"You look beat," Jesper says to the next person over; he doesn't look much friendly than the first man. "It must be the busy season now, right?"
"What do you know about it?"
"My father's a jurda farmer." Wylan digs in his bag again to hide a smile. Jesper says it easily, but he would have even if he was saying that his father was a blacksmith or an actor or a drüskelle's trained wolf. Jesper can make the truth and a lie sound exactly the same, which would be more troubling if he didn't know the difference. "You've got to be in the middle of harvesting by this time of year."
That gets a few grudging nods, like Jesper has earned the barest semblance of civility. One of the workers grumbles, "The farmers'll be lucky if half their crop doesn't rot in the fields."
"Really?" Wylan asks. "The weather doesn't look like it's turning."
"It isn't going to hold clean through to next year."
"Not our problem," another worker says, shrugging. "They only hire half the workers they need, then they'll have to settle for half the product."
"And I'm sure they'll take that explanation well," Jesper says with his dark humor. The guys around them nod, grim recognition. Unreasonable bosses are a universal experience. "I wouldn't've thought it be so hard to find farmhands."
"There's plenty of folk that need work," another man jumps in. They have stumbled on the secret to getting conversation out of hostile strangers: everyone likes an excuse to complain. "Times haven't been this hard since the drought. But the farms around here all got bought up by some merchant down in Kerch. He's told the farmers they have to pay us more, so they've all cut back on how many workers they'll take on."
"Seems a bit short-sighted," Wylan says.
"What do you expect from some dumb merch kid?"
Jesper's eyes narrow. Everything else about him is the same friendly stranger who started this conversation, but Wylan knows how thin that line can be, between amiable and angry. He stretches a leg out and kicks his foot against his knee.
Jesper scowls, but only at him, and he doesn't say anything else.
The farmer comes by soon after to tell the workers their break is over. He scrutinizes Jesper and Wylan with a look that is more reminiscent of a society lady judging their outfits than either the farmer or the society lady would probably care to hear. They head back for the road.
"All right," Wylan says. His feet are sore. He wants a distraction, and Jesper's fiddling with the straps of his pack like he doesn't realize he's doing it. "You can say it."
"Say what?"
"Whatever you were going to say back there."
Jesper scowls. "It doesn't matter now," but not ten feet later he adds, "they shouldn't talk about you like that."
"Like what?" Wylan asks. "Like I'm a sheltered merchling who doesn't understand anything about the real world? You've said that about me and worse."
"Not recently. Not like that." When he glances over, Jesper looks genuinely hurt.
Wylan bumps his shoulder against Jesper's. "It's okay."
"It isn't. I don't like it."
"I don't either." He'd been hungry the entire time that he worked in the tannery, too hungry to find the energy for anything but going back to the tannery where he'd stay hungry. He'd wanted to stop anyone else having to live like that, not put half those people out of work. "We'll just have to think of a different strategy," and he sighs. He doesn't like this kind of problem solving. Chemical equations don't rewrite themselves when you're halfway through balancing them.
"No, I mean, I don't like hearing people talk about you like that. I don't care if any of them are happy."
"You don't mean that."
"I really do."
Wylan shrugs. "At least they're being honest."
Jesper keeps walking for a minute before he straightens up, like he's forcibly pulling himself out of his own thoughts. "Well, this is depressing. Let's catch a ride into town, I want to see what kind of trouble we can shake up."
Not much, as it happens, but not for lack of trying. If Wylan takes away the sting of failure from this trip, he also takes away the memory of Jesper breaking a lantern during an overly enthusiastic conversation about explosives and Wylan buying a round of drinks for everyone to keep the tavern owner from throwing them out.
-
His longest stint as Wylan Hendriks is also the most justified, which makes it jarring that this is the time that Jesper objects.
They travel to Ravka, on business no more official than Jesper's Fabrikator training. His progress has been frustratingly slow with only the guidance of occasional letters from distant contacts and rare books they find at auctions. The situation in Ravka isn't stable, exactly, so traveling incognito is safer than wandering the countryside as one of the richest men in Kerch, even if it means that he has to do it without bodyguards. He doesn't mind; he has Jesper and his guns. He feels safer with Jesper than with anyone else, anyway.
The trip is a mixed success; they meet a couple of Fabrikators who are willing to spend some time with Jesper but not willing to move to Ketterdam. They stay in Ravka far longer than planned, to make the most of it, and their new associates promise to send any possible teachers their way.
Jesper is so committed to acting like he's fine on the trip home, teasing Wylan for his seasickness and hogging more than his fair share of their narrow bunk, that Wylan almost falls for it. The cracks in his performance only start to show once they're back in the house on Geldstraat. He has no interest in the news that his stocks shot up in their absence, he doesn't try to speak to any of the staff, and he only dredges up a smile when Marya greets them. Even then he can't manage any conversation beyond basic pleasantries, and normally he treats charming Wylan's mother as his foremost responsibility in life.
Wylan tries to give him space. Jesper's moods are like the weather on the Wandering Isle: if you don't like it now, wait five minutes.
After a week of storm clouds, he gives up waiting and asks if there's anything he can do to help.
"I'm fine," Jesper snaps.
"You're not." Wylan stands firm. He doesn't cower when people snarl at him anymore, although it's a special kind of horrible when it comes from Jesper. "And you don't have to be, but you shouldn't pretend that you are."
"Really. So when are you going to get tired of pretending to be someone you aren't?"
Wylan rocks back, more surprised than hurt. "What do you -- " mean, but there's only one thing he can mean: this game where Wylan pretends to be no one, pretends he doesn't have expectation and judgment hanging around his neck. Jesper has played along with him, but apparently he's tired of it, although Wylan doesn't understand what the alternative was this time. "Did you not want me to go to Ravka with you?"
Jesper shuts his eyes and breathes in before he responds; more care than he usually puts into reining in his temper, and normally Wylan would be happy to see that, but right now he just wants the truth.
"Of course I wanted you there," and that sounds like the truth. Wylan would say that it is the truth, but then none of this makes sense. "Do you know how cold I would have been sleeping alone in Ravka this time of year?"
"All right," Wylan says, when it becomes obvious that is all that he is getting. "Well, no one's going to freeze, so everything should be fine."
"Yup," Jesper says. "Fine."
-
Wylan's assistants kept things running in their absence, but there's still a backlog of work, decisions that can only be made at the top, double- and triple-checking everything late into the night. He takes the opportunity to really and truly return back to normal: no sneaking out the servant's entrance, dressing in cheap clothes, lying about his name. No cheap tickets for cramped quarters, no inedible food from terrible pubs, no scurrying down dim alleys where no one pays them any mind, except maybe to mug them. Who would regret that choice?
Normal doesn't make much of a difference to Jesper's frame of mind. He acts fine, and most of the time is fine, Wylan thinks. The rest of the time he's antsier than usual. His mood darkens noticeably with every mail delivery, another day without a word from Ravka, and it darkens again in the evenings. Some nights he slips out on his own, and Wylan doesn't ask where he's been. One night he asks Wylan not to let him leave or he'll do something stupid, and Wylan doesn't mind sitting up with him late into the night, but it bothers him to need the precaution, after a long time without.
He doesn't mention anything that evening, when Jesper is pulled tight as a violin string about to snap, or the night after, when he awakens in the dark to find Jesper already sitting up in bed, staring at nothing. He waits for a day when neither of them is exhausted, and then he gives up waiting for that just says one morning, "you can go back to Ravka."
Jesper twists around sharply to look at him from the bookshelf. "You really want to leave the business again so soon?"
Yes. "No, but you could go. You could stay longer on your own, anyway."
"I know I'm allowed to go places on my own," Jesper says. "I was asking about you."
"I can manage without you," and he can. Maybe he couldn't have in those first days back on Geldstraat, but he's done it once, he can do it again. He has people who work for him that he trusts enough to get by. He knows every part of the business now. He doesn't need to scramble for three ledgers to decode every new line that gets read to him.
"Yeah, I can picture it already," Jesper says. "I'd come back home and find a perfect clockwork merchant behind that desk. You haven't gone anywhere in weeks."
Wylan frowns at the non sequitur. "I took my mother to the art museum yesterday. We went to that dinner at the Boregs' -- "
"Anywhere fun. Anywhere outside Ketterdam. I'd be happy if you just took a browboat out to the countryside as long as you didn't drag the Van Eck name behind you."
Wylan blinks. "You said you were tired of it. You wanted me to stop."
Jesper stares at him, bewildered, so at least they have that in common. "Why would I want you to stop doing something that makes you happy?"
"Because it's foolish. It's just putting off the inevitable, pretending like this isn't reality. I know that."
"Wy." Jesper's voice is soft. "I'm not upset because you pretend to be someone else out there. I'm worried because you pretend that you're someone else in here."
"I..." he has to swallow before he can get any more words out, and even then they're faint. "I'm not pretending anything."
"Really? You like manipulating supply chains to boost demand? You like worrying about what the rest of the merch are saying about you behind your back? You like making up excuses to leave the room anytime someone hands you a piece of paper so that I can tell you what it says?"
His cheeks burn. "That isn't fair."
"It isn't fair that you survived everything your father threw at you just so you could do what he wanted all along."
"He didn't want me to take over the business."
"No, he thought you couldn't," Jesper corrects him, "and don't get me wrong, I love spite. If it was me I could happily spend the rest of my life making his business prosper just to prove him wrong, but that's not you. This doesn't make you happy."
"I'm happy." Wylan thinks about it. "Most of the time."
"Really. Pray tell, what makes you happy?"
"You, when you aren't deliberately trying to annoy me," but Jesper doesn't preen or laugh or ogle him, he just looks dead serious. "My mother having a good day. Hearing from Nina and Inej. Writing music."
"All of which are merch things," Jesper says, deadpan.
"It makes me happy to be able to provide for you and mom," Wylan counters. "The way I remember it, you wanted to live in a mansion."
"Wylan, you may not have noticed this, but you are very rich. You don't have to work. Do you think any of us were planning on taking our cut from the Ice Court job just so we could go to a job that we hate every day?"
"That's why you would have all gone broke again in a year."
"No, I would have gone broke gambling it away to some Barrel boss who'd have me knifed in an alley."
Wylan starts. Jesper was perfectly matter-of-fact when he spoke; that only makes it worse. "I'm sorry."
Jesper hops up to sit on the desk, hooks two fingers under Wylan's waistcoat and pulls him forward by it, so he's standing in front of the desk and between Jesper's knees. "Don't apologize because I'm a mess. Apologize because you're a mess."
"Sorry, are you going to apologize any time soon?"
Jesper just grins, crooked but sincere.
"If I apologize." Wylan pauses to figure out what the rest of his thoughts are. "Then I have to try to fix it."
"Would that really be so bad? Finding some way of being happy."
"I'd have to figure out how to do that, first." He doesn't like the idea that there's a hole in him where his ambition ought to be. He had wanted his father's approval, and then his father's money, and then his father's downfall; those dreams had all been realized or released, and it's unsettling to discover that nothing has taken their place. "What did you think you'd do with your share?"
"Go somewhere warm and dangerous," Jesper says. "Meet someone cute. Do something stupid."
"And that would have made you happy?"
"Probably not."
"It isn't warm and you're not allowed to meet anyone cute," Wylan says. Jesper hooks one long leg around his, like a promise, or a bargain: I'm not leaving and neither are you. "Stupid and dangerous wouldn't be hard to find."
"Harder to avoid it, if you look in the right places." Jesper is inappropriately cheerful. "We could be in trouble in less than an hour if you want to slum it in the Barrel again."
"I was not slumming it," Wylan says. "That implies that I wasn't stressed the entire time I lived there."
"And what a shame that you didn't get to enjoy slumming it," Jesper says, ridiculous and earnest at the same time. "You should enjoy things more."
"So should you."
"Oh, gorgeous, I always enjoy myself."
Wylan rests his arms on Jesper's shoulders, crossing them behind his head to hold onto him loosely. "No, you don't."
"No," he admits. "I don't. But it's easier when I don't have to worry about where you're hiding."
He almost asks Jesper what would make him happy, but he already knows. Jesper loves surprises, variety, winning, high stakes, recognition, thinking on his feet, making people laugh and making people angry and making people believe him whether or not they should. Jesper loves attention, and that scares him for a moment, because that's one thing he knows he's sick of.
But he likes seeing Jesper in the spotlight, when he's showing off or feeding on the energy of a room or manipulating a situation into what he wants it to be. Wylan never minds the attention that spills over to him then. There doesn't tend to be much of it; Jesper is very distracting. And if anyone does wonder about him, they usually stop bothering when they see Jesper sling an arm around his waist or whisper in his ear, assuming they've figured out anything worth knowing about some nameless nobody.
"I don't want to hide," Wylan says. "I just don't want people to care what I do."
"Hm." Jesper slides his hand up to rest on Wylan's face. "This time of day no one would look twice at two students taking the boat out to Belendt. We could get a room somewhere and walk from one end of the city to the other. I hear they have some trashy clubs near the university district."
Wylan doesn't like the Belendt line, but he likes the idea of sitting close together, watching Ketterdam disappear, dozing with his head on Jesper's shoulder. He likes the thought of a day with no messages about lost cargo on lost ships, no disappointing mail delivery, no expectations, no one hanging on his every word, waiting for him to mess up or counting on him to get everything right.
"We'd have to come back tomorrow," Wylan points out.
Jesper is carefully neutral when he says, "This time."
It does not feel careful or neutral. It feels like standing on the edge of a cliff with the ground crumbling underfoot. It feels like the end, but if a situation doesn't work, what is there to do but break it down and make a new one? Not today, maybe, not all at once. But -- soon.
"Okay," Wylan says. "Then let's do it."
"Wy." Jesper breathes out softly and rests his forehead against Wylan's. "I thought you'd never ask."